Chapter 11
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The Test
Aoife
“New life always starts in the dark.” — Barbara Brown Taylor
Strep throat, the children at Sunflower Days used to say, was the price you paid for working in a room with twenty small people who had not yet fully committed to the concept of covering their mouths when they coughed.
I had had it twice since starting at the daycare and I had managed it both times with the pragmatism of someone who could not afford to slow down.
Patricia sent me home at lunch on a Tuesday. She looked at me with the focused attention she brought to everything and said, "You have a fever and your voice sounds like gravel. Go home, Aoife." I went home.
The doctor at the clinic prescribed antibiotics, the standard first-line treatment for strep, and I filled the prescription and took the first dose that evening.
I was not thinking about my birth control.
I found out later, much later, that certain antibiotics could interfere with hormonal contraception.
I do not imagine many people know this, because if they did the information would be more prominently placed than it apparently is.
I was sick for five days. Simone came over on the second day.
She sat on the end of my bed and told me about a man she had been seeing, quietly and for longer than she had told me, named Desmond, who worked at a restaurant two blocks from Mae's and had the most ridiculous laugh she had ever heard.
She said this with the particular mixture of delight and self-consciousness of a person who has been surprised by their own feelings, her eyes bright and her mouth slightly curved, as if she had not entirely decided whether to be pleased about it yet and the pleasure kept arriving anyway.
I told her she deserved something good and she rolled her eyes but I could see she was pleased.
Six weeks after the strep throat I was standing in the bathroom on a Sunday morning looking at a test, and the two lines were visible within thirty seconds, and I sat down on the edge of the bath and I held the test in both hands and I did not move for a very long time.
He will not want this, I thought, and the thought was very quiet and very clear and carried the particular quality of a thing you already know before you have fully admitted that you know it.
I got up. I put the test in my cardigan pocket.
I went to the kitchen and I made tea, my grandmother's cup with the chipped handle, and I sat at the table and I looked at the herbs on the windowsill and I talked to her, quietly, the way I sometimes did when I needed to hear a sensible voice and there was no one else to provide it.
"Well," I said. "Here we are."
I was going to keep the baby. I knew this before I had consciously framed it as a decision.
This child will not be given up. This child will not grow up wondering, the way I did, whether there was a version of events in which they were wanted.
Whatever else happens, this child will know that they were wanted.
I sat there until the tea went cold. Then I rinsed my cup and got dressed and I texted Jensen to ask if he could come over on Tuesday evening.
He said he would be there at seven.